461–470 of 1001 posts
I don't get it. Restaurants can choose their customers based on how they behave or even how they are dressed. Why shouldn't online businesses be able to reject some of their customers?
If they were advertising it as "a website for everyone except these opinions: ...", your point would have been valid. That's why.
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That's not charitable, that's obsequious! You have never lost your First Amendment rights in the context of a corporate venture. Citizens United goes substantially beyond affirming that fact: it establishes a separate notion of 1A personhood for the corporation itself .
It’s the same old “personhood” fiction for doing things in groups that’s been around since Dartmouth College vs Woodward, which is over 200 years at this point. Corporations are also entitled to other rights that can be exercised by groups, like not having their property searched without a warrant or seized without just compensation, or their contracts broken. They are presumed innocent in court unless demonstrated g…
I am also not convinced that use of a personal bank account was a significant problem here, unless you mean in the sense that the FEC (rightfully) prohibits excessive individual contributions.
Assuming it was, however: it stands to reason that everyone (including myself!) would be content with a legal structure where N people can pool their money into a publicly auditable political contributions account. I would happily support a law that makes that easier! But that wasn't the intended goal with CU -- the goal there was to channel extraordinary donations from a very small handful of individuals in a manner not accountable to the public.
If this passes, basically what's going to happen is a lot of pre-filtering of people entering social networks akin to next doors strategy. I've worked at a civic tech social network that had no rules, and eventually the extremists pushed out all the normal folks - it's just stupid shouting matches. We tore it all down and made isolated communities. It's basically the only way to have real discourse.
Yet Reddit, that follows this model, still manages to engage in suppression of on-topic viewpoints that moderators and/or Reddit employees disagree with.
Important to note that this 5th Circuit ruling conflicts with the 11th Circuit's ruling. And SCOTUS had previously reinstated an injunction against this very same law. And this 5th Circuit opinion has very idiosyncratic reasoning [0, just the first few pages will blow your hair back]. A sample: "In urging such sweeping relief, the platforms offer a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment. That Amendment, of cours…
The term “conservative” means nothing if you apply it to a court which has overturned years of legal norm across various areas of law.
your definition of conservative seems to be "obeys Newton's second law", or going further, "synonymous with hysteresis": "resists change, but thereupon resists changing back"?
that's just not how people use the term.
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> If social media wishes to be immune from lawsuits regarding the content it publishes, section 203, then it should not have the ability to censor such content for an explicit commercial revenue model. Why? This is seems like a total non-sequitur. It's pretty obvious that the individual posting illegal content is the person responsible for it and not the platform it's posted to, unless the platform is soliciting or r…
230 is broad. At the time, websites were mostly just hosts of content. The individual is posting on the website but otherwise the website is a tool. This changes with recommendation algorithms. Nearly all social media is based on some kind of recommendation algorithm. Should that be covered by 230? It could be argued that it starts to get closer to an endorsement of certain content (and indeed, some of that recommend…
But we know that isn't actually the case. The algorithms are designed to drive engagement, what they show you is a function of your behavior on the site, it's not an "endorsement" by the site creators, they're finely tuned machine learning systems optimized for ad dollars - that's it.
Once again, this is just another example of how the ad model incentivizes pernicious behavior. If these sites were under a subscription model they'd be happy to offer you the option to sort your feed with a purely chronological algorithm because they'd still be getting paid regardless of your engagement behavior.
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I don't understand your point or what you are responding to :(. The issue at hand is whether the concept of a spam filter violates the position of these laws, and I do not think it does as long as the spam filter is not a universal configuration that is forced on everyone . As long as you can either deactivate the spam filter entirely or whitelist specific senders (though I can make more elaborate arguments where thi…
It was to your comment. Google blocks some spam messages before they reach your inbox and you can't disable this
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The decision[0] gives different logic (quoting from page 85): If a firm’s core business is disseminating others’ speech, then that should weaken, not strengthen, the firm’s argument that it has a First Amendment right to censor that speech. In PruneYard, for example, the shopping mall was open to the public—but for the purpose of shopping, not sharing expression. So it was perhaps tenuous for the State to use the pub…
If you say "we are going to restrict ourselves [at the Government's insistence] to only moderating non-political speech" then someone will insist that some part of your non-political speech is actually political. And from some perspective they will be right. Then you get to negotiate with the government and the courts about what they consider to be political speech or not. And suddenly you no longer live in a country…
The overarching issue is that I don't see what the first amendment has to do with this at all. Corporations have zero obligations to anyone under the first amendment, which only applies to the government.
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> I don't see how the heck my website is a public square but my home or café isn't, this argument sounds self-contradictory. If it's a website with over 50 million users, and it's designed explicitly as a place for these users to express themselves, then calling it "a public square" seems entirely warranted.
Why?
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Reddit is highly moderated and censored. You can't even post facts in /r/conservative without being banned. Reddit also has a Terms of Service and it has banned hate groups under such terms of service. With a large bias towards far right hate groups because there really is no existence of far left hate groups. So of course moderation seems biased when your views are hateful to begin with. Advertisers generally want n…
Moderated by unpaid users = shit moderation, you get what you pay for. Moderators get rewarded with the rush of 'power'
At some point it's going to be too hard and too negative to be an online 'speech' company. If anything big enough to have to deal with this were to disappear (bankrupt, pivot to other business, shrink to a smaller niche, or just disband), that would be nice and quiet for everyone. At least there is no law requiring a business to continue to exist just so a screaming cesspool that depends on it can also exist.
It will create echo chambers of similar views.